Further adventures in Skyrim

Continued Skyrim for a couple of hours this morning, driving Toby a bit nuts by running around a meadow for twenty minutes practicing with the controller, as my thumbs just don’t want to cooperate with each other or with the rest of my hands. In the face of an oncoming threat, it’s currently a 50-50 chance whether Murderface reacts by attacking somewhere in their general direction, or by repeatedly taking out his weapon and putting it away, because I haven’t internalized that I should use my forefingers on the R1 and L1 buttons to fight and my thumb on the square button to arm and disarm.

Toby is showing admirable restraint with me, especially because he’s a careful gamer of the sort who thoroughly explores a location in a clockwise fashion, leaving no loot unexamined, while I get distracted by shiny things and run off.

Murderface lived up to his name by running into a bandit encampment, screaming and shooting fire from his off hand, flailing at anything that moved and quite a bit that didn’t with a large mace. (I think Murderface is more a blunt-instrument kind of guy than an elegant swordplay kind of guy.) He managed to clear out the bandits the second time around, because he fell into a pit trap the first time he tried and opened up his inventory of spells instead of his inventory of healing potions, delaying just long enough for the poison spikes to kill him.

After he resurrected and attacked the camp successfully, I discovered mining–if you’ve got a pickaxe in your inventory and come across a lode in-game you can mine for a short bit and gain iron ore and other things. So thanks to game mechanics, Murderface would sneak slowly and quietly down a passageway in order not to gain the attention of the remaining bandits, then spot an ore-bearing vein and forget everything to haul out a pickaxe and bang loudly away at it for a while. Then he’d go back to sneaking again.

Speaks the guy who’s gone through Skyrim TWICE in stealth mode (where you basically crouch down and tiptoe so it’s harder for enemies to spot you) 75% of the time. And who is making plans for a third run, this time with a sneaky mage.

New things Murderface has eaten: wheat, tundra cotton, moth wings, torchbug thorax. Plus a bunch of actual food because he was carrying too much weight and for some reason I thought he’d eat the food rather than just dropping it. I guess he had the munchies.